DShomshak

Every cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kg, so a 2m x 2m x 2m cube (the base volume for AoE (Any Area) is 8000 kg, which requires 42 STR. However, the 6e text of Telekinesis seems to forbid applying that STR per unit volume of a larger AoE. Page 296: CC leaves out that text, but once again I am hesitant to consider that a "rule change" that tacitly endorses mass per area rather than mass distributed over an area. It may be moot. 42 STR per 2m cube doesn't allow a very large Area Of Effect Advantage. I actually get a larger volume of water just using 67 STR TK. EDIT: If the calculation is per cubic meter instead of per 2m cube (27 STR TK, or 40 base points) I get +1 1/2 Advantage. Uisng Any Area but Fixed Shape, I can have a passage through the water that's 2m wide, 4m tall (give some head room) and 64 m long. 208 feet is a little more impressive, though it's still not enough to let Brother Bone open a passage across, say, the Hudson River. Dean Shomshak

Hm. 5th and 6th editions explicitly say that Tunneling does not work through air or liquids.: it "only works on solid substances, such as soil." CC, with its abbreviated descriptions, does not include that specification. But I'm leery of taking that as a "rules change." Sigh. A disadvantage of knowing multiple iterations of the system. (Or a Complication, if you prefer. ) Dean Shomshak

Checking the nvironmental Conditions Table (p. 379 od 5e, which is what I have handy at the moment), being in water results in -2 DC and, if underwater, -2 DC to all attacks unless you wear SCUBA gear or make a suitable (undefined here) Skill Roll. You're also holding your breath or drowning. Change Environment is sufficiently broad to cover that, I think -- though Doc persuades me Barrier could work in 6th/CC. Currently I'm puzzling over the reverse of this: opening a gap in a body of water, a la Moses parting the Red Sea. Telekinesis to force the water apart is the simplest, but water is so heavy that even spending 100 points (the limit here -- the Power is a Multipower slot) only moves a fairly unimpressive volume of water. Say, 67 STR TK moves 270 tons of water, which could correspond to a passage 2 meters wide, 3 meters high, and 45 meters long, which is only twice the length of my house. Not very impressive, considering what else one can do with 100 Active Points. I've thought of Change Environment, which can sometimes be allowed to *remove* the same penalties it creates. In this case, a CE to counter the -2 DCV penalty, the -2 DC penalty (stretching things here, guessing that a 5-point CE effect such as TK STR or points of damage will work for countering 5-point DCs), and the damage of drowning (same, and perhaps stretching things even more). CE can also be MegaScaled. But a nitpicker might say that such a CE wouldn't force one to walk instead of swim. I am not a nitpicker for my own games, but this is to update Brother Bone (from Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies) for new publication. I would prefer not to handwave such details. But Doc D makes me wonder if Barrier could do the job: create a Barrier that *only blocks passage of water* and is fully permeable to everything else. Reading through Barrier, I'm... not sure this can work. The best I might be able to do is a Barrier that expands outward in the shape of a rectangular tube to push aside the water, leaving an air gap in which people may walk but cannot swim. Even this feels kind of handwavy, though. Does anyone have any better ideas? Dean Shomshak

Noted, Duke. I'm sure we'll all miss the good sense you occasionally slip into your long, wandering anecdotes! (Actually, I do find them interesting.) Dean Shomshak

The ATC story said two representatives voted "Present," rather than yea or nay, but didn't specify whether than yea or nay, but I didn't catch if the report specified they were Democrats. I could look it up, I suppose, but I'm busy with other things. I'm not sure how to interpret "Present." Dean Shomshak Ow, ow, mixed metaphors! Dean Shomshak

A remarkable system of exoplanets: ‘Shocked and delighted': Astronomers find six planets orbiting in resonance (msn.com) (The BBC story was cringe-inducing. The presenter interviewing the scientist kept calling it a "universe" instead of a "solar system." Aargh!) Dean Shomshak I was reading about making pharmaceuticals in space back in the 1980s, in books like Stine's The Space Enterprise. Now it's happening for real. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/29/low-earth-orbit-open-for-business-varda-space-industries/ Dean Shopmshak

One of the last story arcs in Kurt Busiek's Astro City was the saga of G-Dog, a hero who was a man mystically merged with his pet corgi. In one of those one-panel toss-offs Busiek does so well, at one point G-Dog led a team of super-powered animals... one of which, a cat with Desolidification IIRC, had appeared in an earlier story as the pet of two superheroines -- who didn't know their kitty had powers and was assisting them. Dean Shomshak

Oh, hey, and how could we forget Zelazny's Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness? In the former, another case of humans posing as gods using advanced technology and possibly artificial psionics. (It's been a while since I read it, but I remember one of the quasi-Hindu god-men saying that the new Agni [fire god] still has to use a flamethrower.) Plus demons who are actually the conquered energy-being indigenous inhabitants of the planet in question. Lord of Light was a big inspiration to me in designing the rival psionic aristocracies of planet Sard, mentioned upthread. Creatures of Light and Darkness is harder to gauge. Some of the characters might be god-men enhanced/ascended through indistinguishable-from-magic technology. The Steel General is called out as once having been mortal. (And likewise his steed, which was once a horse.) But others...? They may, indeed, be gods. Dean Shomshak

For instance, the psionic aristocracy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" series objectively has power that other Darkovans lack, which they maintain and strengthen through selective breeding. (With, in the planet's past, catastrophic results when the powers became too strong.) Though the distinction is not as clear-cut as the aristocrats like to believe: The lords and ladies of the Seven Domains are still all too human, which means there are by-blows and their further descendants -- an important plot point in at least one of the novels. The psionic technology of Darkover also resulted in at least one relic from that catastrophic past that could evoke the psionic construct of a god that was worshiped by one of the planet's subcultures. An extremely dangerous divine/psionic construct, especially when being evoked by a group of people with, IIRC, pretty serious hang-ups of their own. Dean Shomshak

To the roster of god-emperors I'll ad Ptath, god-emperor of a far-future Earth(?) in A. E. Van Vogt's Book of Ptath. We've discussed before the tendency of alleged future SF settings to emulate past forms such as empires with feudal nobility. I don't find this implausible. Humans had monarchies and empires, including god-emperors, a lot longer than we've had liberal democratic republics. If one does *not* assume an irreversible force of social progress, it seems plausible that the social forms that were most common in the past would be more likely in the future, too. Just regression to the mean. (Though by that argument, the overwhelming majority of future societies should be hunter-gatherer bands. OK, I'll grant a compelling force of technology that might limit high-tech future societies to forms that developed post-agriculture, with larger and denser populations.) God-emperors especially. Humans invented god-emperors at the dawn of recorded history, and they never went out of style. See Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and other recent despots to whom people ascribed more-than-human status. Something in humans wants to grovel in awe before an incarnate god. We will continue to see god-emperors as long as humans stay human. Dean Shomshak

I would be very surprised if any comics creator follows fora for obscure roleplaying games. We may amuse ourselves, but I estimate the chance of affecting any existing title is approximately zero. As for PCs having pets, in my Avant Guard campaign the hero Huntsman can summon a demon horse named Brimstone that carries him through the air. Written up as a Power, Huntsman is sure it's just a construct of magical energy... but wow, Brimstone, sure manages to look smug when women coo over him, pet him and try to feed him. Maybe Huntsman is projecting. Dean Shomshak

We stopped buying wrapping paper decades ago. We still have at least a half-dozen rolls. Maybe we'll start on them when we run out of wrapping paper re-used from past years. I figure our stock should last up to my neices' grandchildren. We have all the lights we need, too. I still put up the string of lights around the door that my parents bought for their fist Christmas, at least 70 years ago. Most of the sockets still work. Ornaments? HAHAHAHAHA. In addition to glass balls, strings of beads, little plastic musical instruments, and other ornaments that are older than I am, we have Christmas balls I made decades ago with Styrofoam balls covered in colorful fabric or silky thread, ribbon, beads and jewelry findings, and all the ornaments my mother received as presents when she taught preschool. We have enough for at least 3 trees. We suck as consumers. But tradition? We've got tradition in spades. Dean Shomshak

A nice Thanksgiving yesterday, with family. Today is Eat Leftovers Day. Also Stay Home And Don't Buy Anything Day, for I am a traitor to the American way of life. Dean Shomshak Also: So much delicious pie... Dean Shomshak

23 minutes in, Arthur mentions filled-in mineshafts as giveaways of pre-human civilizations. Others too, which would require fairly baroque scenarios to remove from geological evidence. I too thought of banded iron deposits; also fossil fuels, which we are ripping through at a tremendous rate and which are not replenished at all quickly -- or at all, since Earth is unlikely to see another Carboniferous Period. A pre-human civilization that maintained comparable-to-current technology for very long should have used them up. Except... Earth's surface has seen an awful lot of erosion and deposition. It might be interesting to ask a geologist how accessible the Minnesota banded iron deposits were 50 or 100 million years ago. Or conversely, an estimate of banded iron deposits that could have been accessible long ago but were eroded away and lost. Or on the third hand, there might be deposits that are now deeply buried, but that might be easier to mine in another 50 million years (thought this total reserve must inevitably go down over time). IIRC the recent NOVA series "Ancient Earth" mentioned that eroded coal deposits put a lot of carbon into sea ooze, which eventually got cooked into petroleum. The coal fields under the Soberian Traps also got cooked away by thoat series of massive eruptions, helping to bring about the Great Dying. So there might be major coal deposits that were accessible once and whose fate is now impossible to guess. Again, I think one would need to ask a geologist. As Arthur says, it's still all a bit contrived. But a clever writer might be able to manage an illusion of plausibility. (When I ran my Planetary Romance campaign, I went the other direction and made the extinct aliens of 40 Eridani impossible to miss. Not only did their towering cities of age-defying crystal still standing, needing only new plumbing and wiring for humans to inhabit, they knew they were doomed by a companion star's transition from red giant to white dwarf and left records of their culture in vaults filled with neon for preservation, surrounded by huge bullseyes of concrete salted with long-lived radioisotopes as "Dig Here" signs that could last a billion years, in case their attempts at submarine and subterranean cities failed. They were people who knew how to rage against the dying of the light. But humans also found a planet so mined-out that heavy industry could not flourish, which is why so many people still ride around on domesticated animals, use sailing ships, and fight with glass swords instead of heavy artillery...) Dean Shomshak

The only case where I ported a character directly from other media into my Champions game was in my early "Seattle Sentinels" campaigns, in which the heroes' police xcontact was a captain named Dietrich. He was Lieutenant Dietrich from Barney Miller, promoted and moved to the other side of the country. At least, that's how I played him. While I've read lots of comic books (mostly Bronze Age; the Iron Age '90s eventually bored me into quitting everything but Astro City), I have never ported characters directly from a comic book into my game, or copied a plot from anywhere. Types and tropes, yes, but I have tried to learn from rather than copy. Like, my dimensional conqueror Skarn the Shaper happened because I knew my Dr. Strange-inspired "Keystone Konjurors" campaign needed a Big Bad filling the same role as the Dread Dormammu -- but I gave Skarn quite a different origin and personality. His home, the Congeries, is very much a "Dark Dimension" homage, though. Also, I pulled various demons and other creatures from mythology and occult lore, but translating them into something gameable usually takes a fair bit of, shall we say, creative re-interpretation or extending of source material. My vampires show a fair bit of resemblance to those in Vampire: the Masquerade, but that's fair because VtM draws a wide net through vampire pop culture. No background mythology about Caine (the Bible guy but spelled with a final E to be more pretentious), Antediluvians, the Great Jyhad, blah blah blah. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and found it didn't fit. Dean Shomshak

Another library turned up in my newsfeed: Oxford's Bodleian Library. The slide show even notes it as a "Dark Academia" setting, and that its shelves have appeared in various Fantasy and superhero movies. Inside Europe’s oldest library with 13 million books and bizarre membership rules (msn.com) Dean Shomshak

Duke, you raised your kids right. Dean Shomshak

This item just turned up in my internet front page newsfeed. A secret library walled away decades (centuries?) ago should be good for a Fantasy scenario or two. Plus it's in Tibet, for extra mystical glamor. Unveiling the Unseen: 84,000 Unread Manuscripts Discovered at Monastery (msn.com) Dean Shomshak

A recent article in The Economist pointed out that several developing South and East Asian countries are among the most rapidly 'aging,' demographically... without having first attained the degree of affluence enjoyed by, say, Japan. This will make supporting a large elder population even more difficult. One solution might be to import labor. In a few decades, countries that are now freaking out about unplanned immigration from the Middle East and Africa may be actively courting such immigrants as a supplemental labor force, because those regions are the demographically 'youngest.' As a lover of irony, I find some piquance in this. Dean Shomshak

It's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and yes, it is excellent! EDIT: Oops, should have checked the next page before responding. But it's still a wonderful, and wonder-full, movie. Dean Shomshak

People snarking on Twitter (pardon me, "X") over something a politician said isn't usually worth sharing here, but this is just too funny because it's so true. Far-Right GOP Lawmaker's Question About Republicans Backfires Spectacularly (msn.com) I'd suggest to Mr. Roy that he should switch parties and join the Dems. Even if his policy goals are anathema to most Democrats, he'd be in a party whose members actually want to legislate, and he would be in a position to attempt rational persuasion. Dean Shomshak

I am reminded of Liz Truss and the head of lettuce. Dean Shomshak

Never had it (yet), though my brother did. I had to bring him his meals at the far end of the house, both of use masked, and do his covid tests until we were sure he was over it. I was pretty seriously worried after spending a few hours unmasked among hundreds of people to visit a Lovecraft=themed Hunted House attraction in Tacoma, then out to a Lovecraft-themed bar afterward for nachos. (Devil's Reef, also in downtown Tacoma. Tki bar, but the drinks all have names inspired by "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Proprietor recommends you not have the Third Oath of Dagon.) But it's ten days out and I've still shown no symptoms and my tests are negative. I live with and help care for my very old, very frail mother. If she caught covid, it would certainly kill her. So I dislike taking chances. Dean Shomshak

Vide Doc Democrqacy's admonition, here's All Things Considered's recent interview with an Oregon Representative who seems like a very earnest public servant. His special interest is public transportation and making cities more walkable and bikeable. Naturally, I'd never heard of him before this, because loudmouth lunatics hog all the media attention. And the media usually let them. Though Mr. Blumenauer has also decided not to seek reelection. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211949662/an-exit-interview-with-democratic-rep-earl-blumenauer-of-oregon Dean Shomshak

Restrainable was my first thought as well. However, if the weapons created are *exactly* the same as the 'mundane' versions except for how they are created (psionic energy instead of a weaponsmith), perhaps the Power you're looking for is a Physical Transform: Weapon from Nothing. Expanded Results Group, to make any kind of weapon (I'd set that at +1/2 for any weapon, +1/4 for a limited selection). Limited Target Group (Only from Thin Air, -1/4), because you can't use the Transform to change ogther objects into weapons -- meaning you can't use the Transform to get rid of, say, an opponent's armor. Likely All-or-Nothing (-1/2) so a few dice are enough to make hand weapons but the character won't use it repeatedly to create Mind Trebuchets. Then whatever other Limitations you think are appropriate -- maybe Concentration and a Phase of Extra Time? The "reversal condition" might be when the character no longer needs the weapon or the weapon is off his or her person for more than a Turn. No equipping armies with materialized weapons! Dean Shomshak